


all we are, all we've ever been

by IseultOfIreland



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 09:59:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14078400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IseultOfIreland/pseuds/IseultOfIreland
Summary: The past twenty years, in snippets of memory.





	all we are, all we've ever been

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Thank you so much for all the nice comments on my last fic! I know this "past twenty years" stuff has been done before and by people way more talented than I am, but I couldn't get this story out of my head.

Scott has always been there. She doesn’t remember her life without him. (Oh, how he’d laughed the first time she’d told him that.) Or maybe she does, but the world before him is fuzzy and made up of mostly vague impressions. Jordan laughing as they throw snowballs at Casey. A skating rink bigger than the ocean and colder than snow. The crunchy, crisp sound of autumn leaves underfoot. Bits and pieces.

***

On the day she meets him, she’s seven years old and shivering. She knows skating rinks are cold—she’s been skating for a whole year already and is much, _much_ better than Jordan—but she keeps thinking the rink will start getting warmer if she just gets used to it. It doesn’t. So she’s skating in circles, waiting for her teacher and wondering where she can get another pair of gloves, when someone calls her name.

It’s Ms. Carol, beckoning her over from the boards.

She’s still thinking about how unbelievably cold it is while she puts on her skate guards—the right then the left, always—and walks over to Ms. Carol. She wants to start skating already, real skating and not just boring warm-ups that don’t actually make her feel any warmer.

“Hi, Tessa. Can you go stand next to Scotty for a second?”

Scotty is standing next to the window. She’s vaguely aware of who he is—the Moir boy with the brown hair who’s always skating around way too fast. She’s seen him skating with another girl before, looking bored. Tessa thinks the girl is probably still in the changing room, nice and warm. She wishes she was there, too.

They stand there for what feels like a long time and Tessa isn’t exactly sure what Ms. Carol is doing, but she really, _really_ wants to get back on the ice.

“Ok.” Ms. Carol says finally. She’s smiling her happy smile, the one she gives Tessa whenever Tessa skates a program without falling. “Tessa, you’re going to skate with Scotty for today. We’ll see how that goes.”

Tessa considers protesting. She doesn’t want to hold the hand of this boy she barely knows when she’s doing just fine on her own, thank you very much. But Ms. Carol is looking so pleased and Tessa doesn’t want to disappoint her, so she nods and follows him onto the ice.

It takes her all of two minutes to realise that Scott Moir is nine and unruly and much more interested in wreaking havoc than learning how to skate. He’s skating around at breakneck speed with no particular purpose while Ms. Carol, his aunt, yells at him that “this is figure skating, not hockey!”

“Hey!” Tessa calls out indignantly, “You’re suppose to be skating with me.”

He skates to a stop and turns to face her, half-guilty, half-annoyed, and very much perplexed. She doesn’t know what she expects him to say but it’s not “I’m sorry,” with a sheepish look on his face.

She holds out her hand. A smile spreads across his face when he sees her too-big gloves, and that is the beginning of everything.

(Had she known it then? That eventually _he_ would become everything—her touchstone, her constant, her best friend and biggest supporter? Looking back, she thinks she remembers something inside her shifting. A connection, a bond. Like puzzle pieces or magnets snapping together—two halves of a whole. Somewhere deep inside, they knew they belonged to each other.)

***

When she thinks of their first season in juniors she sees maple leaves on their skates; her competition dress bright as nail polish, feather-light. Scott chugging down a whole gallon of chocolate milk just because his mom wasn’t there to stop him. She sees the vast arenas and cheering crowds and the two of them, tiny kids in the middle of that huge expanse of ice. Even then, her eyes found his and it was just them, center ice. Together.

The memories from those years are quiet and comfortable, rose-tinted. Scott sitting next to her, rapping at the top of his lungs to a song on the car radio, off-pitch and garbling the words but making up for it in excitement. Scott skating around in circles with his arms out during practice, like some sort of demented airplane. Scott looking at her from the tops of podiums, eyes alight with pride and happiness.

And Tessa—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—saying “we” even when she meant herself.

***

She cries the entire car ride to Michigan. She doesn’t stop when Scott begs her to please, please stop crying because it’s killing him and he’ll end up crashing the car. She doesn’t stop when the concern on his face shifts to annoyance then to murderous intent.

She stops briefly when they’re driving over the border, because part of her still cares about what people think and she doesn’t want the border services officer to assume she’s being kidnapped. It’s bad enough that he thinks they’re eloping and insists on calling her parents before letting them through.

She cries herself to sleep and is shaken awake by Scott, who forces her to drink Gatorade because he’s worried she’s crying herself to dehydration.

She wants to cry some more when they arrive and she sees the ugly, squat buildings that make up Canton, but she’s run out of tears by then. Their new coach, Marina, takes one look at her swollen eyes and puffy face and shakes her head wordlessly.

***

An incomplete list of things she leaves behind:

Her mother and Jordan, the people she loves most in the entire world, who know her better than anyone. The beautiful house she’s lived in since she was born, with the creaky front door and mailbox slightly askew. Canada, with all its sprawling beauty and warm-hearted people. Her childhood bedroom and her favorite bookstore and the crisp, clean air of home. The park where she had her first kiss. Half of her favourite dresses and her overflowing bookshelf and her entire collection of CDs. Her teddy bear, Velvet, because she is not a little girl anymore (she asks her mother to mail the bear two weeks later, and sleeps with it for months because it smells like home). A piece of her heart with every person, every place she’s ever loved.

(She takes with her an Olympic dream and a boy she’s known since childhood. And if sometimes he’s arrogant or pushy, she doesn’t mind. She’s left everything behind but at least she still has him.)

***

It’s a miserable, unnaturally cold day in mid-autumn and Tessa knows it’s not going to be a good one. She knows when she wakes up twenty minutes late because her alarm didn’t ring. When she trips on her neighbour’s discarded garden gnome (they live in an apartment building, what use could he possibly have for a garden gnome?) and falls down several steps. When she tries to call Scott and it goes straight to voicemail. She knows when her legs start throbbing even before she’s finished lacing up her skates. Today is not a good day.

Scott, evidently, did not get the memo. He’s dancing in the locker room when she arrives, looking smug and too-awake for half past six in the morning.

“Ooh, look who finally got here!” He says, twenty years old and sounding twelve. “Marina’s on the warpath.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the warning.”

True enough, Marina zeroes in on her the second she walks into the rink, and Tessa has to withstand five minutes of very angry Russian rambling—with some English sprinkled in for good measure—before she’s allowed on the ice. She tries her best to look repentant, but her legs hurt and Scott keeps imitating Marina when Marina’s back is turned so Tessa’s not exactly focused.

Despite the ache in her legs, despite the dull tingling building up in her calves, she’s eager to start skating and escape Marina’s wrath, escape this disaster of a morning. On the ice, she thinks, she’s in control. (This is her first mistake.)

They’re practicing their free dance but nothing is going right, and she’s starting to think this whole day is cursed. She slips on a patch of ice and nearly falls, then Scott messes up the twizzles, then she steps down on the wrong edge after a lift.

“ _Nyet!_ ” Comes Marina’s voice, harsh and grinding. “Again.” A sharp inhale and shake of the head. “ _Nyet, nyet, nyet!”_

And her calves—burning, burning, like her legs are too tight for her muscles. She holds onto the boards for support like she hasn’t since she was six and first learning to skate.

“Hey. You ok?” Scott skates up behind her, too close, hand on her waist.

“Hmm?” She asks distractedly. “Oh, fine. I just need a minute.”

“Are you sure?”

“Scott, just give me a minute! And just—don’t touch me. Please.” She pushes him off.

(How to explain that she gets lightheaded when he’s always standing too close and putting his hands all over her body? How to explain that to him it might be innocuous, but it sets her heart aflutter? She doesn’t know.)

The hurt and confusion on his face as he skates away make her feel slightly guilty, but she can’t handle him right now, not when she’s in pain and her head is swimming because it feels like she can’t get enough air no matter how hard she breathes.

Scott glares sourly at Tessa as they skate back to starting positions. The music starts again, and the last thing she sees before they start dancing is Marina’s face, hard and cold as stone.

For the first few steps, she’s ok. Then the pain starts creeping in, but she keeps going. She keeps going even when her calves feel like they’re burning from the inside out, and every tiny movement is excruciating. (That is her second mistake.) One second they’re transitioning into a step sequence, the next she’s falling. She feels his arms around her moments before she hits the ice, and it’s terrifying because—

“I can’t feel my legs. I can’t… Something’s wrong, I don’t—Help! I don’t know what’s wrong!” Her voice sounds very small all of a sudden.

Her first instinct is to fight, and she does, flailing wildly in his arms like a cornered animal, not caring if she hurts him.

“Tessa, hey! It’s me. It’s me.”

Part of her brain—the part that’s still going through the steps in her mind as the music plays; the part that’s slowly realizing that something is seriously, medically wrong—is still rational enough to recognize him. She stops fighting and lets out a pathetic whimper she can’t believe is coming from her. Her legs hurt, hurt, hurt and the rink is so cold and she doesn’t understand what’s happening. She wants her mother.

“Hey, it’s gonna be ok. You’re ok.”

Scott tries to comfort her as he carries her out of the rink, but she sees her panic reflected in his eyes.

***

Suddenly, they’re not together. Suddenly, it’s just her with her injury and the pain that makes it hard to walk and—worst of all—the overwhelming doubt that keeps her up at night. It’s her, determined to make it through another training session because they’re two years away from the Olympics and this is their chance. They are _so close_ to the dream they gave up everything for.

Suddenly, Tessa is eighteen and alone in a hospital in London, trying not to cry as the doctors tell her she may never skate again.

She’s eighteen and close to tears because she hates, _hates_ , the walls of her hospital room, white and sterile and always too bright. She hates the way it reeks of alcohol, stifling and heavy, and the nurses who try to comfort her in all the wrong ways. She hates the fifteen glorious seconds after waking up when she doesn’t remember where she is, when she thinks she’s ok—only for memory to bring everything crashing down.

(More than anything, she hates the way she keeps waiting for a call that never comes.)

“Tess, have you thought about what you’re going to do?” Jordan asks, hesitantly. Tessa stares back blankly. “You know, if…”

_If she never skates again. If her legs really are fucked up beyond all repair. If it turns out the last eleven years of waking up before dawn, of starving herself, of crying herself to sleep at night, homesick, of spending all day in a freezing rink were all for nothing. If, if, if, if—what a useless word._

She wants to scream and Jordan must see that or something like it on her face, because she shuts up and hugs her.

Suddenly, Tessa is eighteen and it feels like her life is over.

***

Jordan—beautiful, clueless Jordan—comes in one day and, in all her well-meaning kindness, breaks Tessa’s heart with two simple sentences: “You shouldn’t worry so much. Alma told mom that Scotty’s been training with some other girls, so your routines should be fine when you get back.”

Tessa sits there, rigid and immobile, as if struck by lightning.

(People should be louder when they break. There should be some sort of warning noise—a siren, a scream. There’s always sound when mirrors break, or glasses, plates. Snap. _Crack_. Why do hearts shatter so silently?)

For Tessa, heartbreak starts like this: bitterness, disappointment. The irrational desire to hit something because she’s so angry at the world, at herself, at him for giving up on her when she would never— _never_ —have given up on him. She squeezes her hands into fists so tight her nails draw blood, but she doesn’t even notice.

***

Her first day back and she’s still a little unsteady on her feet, but determined not show it. She sees him and the world stops. Scott’s hair is floppier and longer than before, but he still has the same easy confidence as he stands, laughing, on the ice—and something stirs in her because, goddammit, she missed him. She wants to hug him. She wants to hit him.

“Scott,” she says, voice thick with emotion, but she can’t bring herself to finish the sentence. _Why didn’t you call? How could you abandon me? How could you even consider switching partners?_ Most of all she wants to ask: _If I hadn’t come back, would you have left me behind?_ But she thinks she knows the answer and she’s too afraid to hear it.

Instead, she says, “It’s good to see you.” Quietly. Measuredly. The ice a barrier between them. Then she walks away.

“Tessa, wait—”

She does, reluctantly. She watches him as he puts on his skate guards, clumsily, and walks towards her, clumsily. He won’t stop staring at her. Part of her wishes he would trip.

“Listen, I’m—I—uh—how’re you doing?” He says, also clumsily.

“Fine.”

“Good… So, do you wanna hang out or something?” His eyes are eager, puppy-like.

A pause as she squints at him, disbelieving. “I—no, Scott. I do not want to hang out.”

Hurt flashes across his face. Good. She walks away before he can say anything else.

***

No more almond milk cappuccinos waiting for her at the rink. No more staying up late talking about nothing, half-drunk on sleep deprivation. No more movie marathons or weekend drives to see their families, Scott laughing in the driver’s seat beside her. No more laughing. No more joking or teasing during practices, only the music. No more squeezing his hand when she’s nervous before a competition. No more standing too close and no more touching unless it’s choreographed. No more sharing their feelings either.

Instead: waking up to her alarm at five am and hoping, praying, begging her calves don’t hurt too much today. Staying in on weekends because she’s too exhausted to go out. Skyping her family every night and doing her best not to cry at the sound of her mom’s voice. On a good day, training until she’s too tired to get up; on a bad day, crying out of sheer frustration, forcing herself to walk to the kitchen on burning legs.

Instead: Leaving the rink as soon as training is over and when Scott asks _how are you doing_ , answering _fine_ _thank you_. When he says _I’m worried about you_ , saying _don’t I’m fine don’t worry._ Or, with biting coldness, _leave me alone I can take care of myself_. When he tries to hold her hand, switching to a skating hold. Slipping away bit by bit by bit.

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter turned out to be a lot more angsty—and a lot longer—than intended, but thanks for reading! My tumblr is tessxvirtue.tumblr.com, so come yell about VM with me.


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